1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

4 Journalism Online
transform not only the medium, but the very fabric of our lives.
‘It’s revolutionary!’ proponents shout. ‘It’s amazing. It’s the
next new thing!’
And instead, it turns out to be, well, nothing. Given a few
months in the sun, the next new thing inevitable sags and wilts,
either disappearing altogether or simply fading into the
background of niche usage. 5
The innocent are swept up in the lemming rush too. Overnight,
companies – widget makers the world over – were told that they had
to have a web presence. Never mind that they knew as much about
content creation and design as the average journalist knows about
commerce and balance sheets.
The results, on display for all (and that means the whole world) to
see can be painful. In a recent survey of UK companies 6 , the content
management consultancy MediaSurface found that 77% published
out-of-date information on the web. Many companies, they
concluded, had ‘lost control’ of their web sites.
But let’s stop there. Time to give the barometer a tap. The needle
seems to be stuck again on doom and gloom. Is there no middle
ground?
One of the problems, of course, is that the ‘digital revolution’,
with all the attendant hype, is a child of its time. The Internet and its
applications such as the World Wide Web have not enjoyed the
freedom of other, earlier, media. Radio and television were both
revolutionary in their day. But they were allowed to experience
their growing pains away from the glare of intense expectation on a
global scale. They also didn’t have to grapple with that most
voracious monster, the marketing machinery of late-twentiethcentury
capitalism.
If people had bought their first television sets in the UK, to watch
the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, expecting to see the
ceremony in full colour from fifteen different camera angles, with
edited highlights and slow motion replays, they would have queued
up to return their sets afterwards and demand their money back.
5 www.theobvious.com
6 Published in September 2000 and quoted in Dot Journalism. (www.journal-
ism.co.uk/ezine_plus/dotjpub/story 166.shtml).